Tuesday, February 14, 2006

As I understand it, the business model over at SimplyHired is to attract job seekers to the site (mostly by scraping jobs off the internet and surrounding them with "web 2.0" tools) and then essentially re-sell that traffic to corporate HR types. Today, most of the ads are from Google, but the long term play is to get recruiters bidding on keywords like "software engineer" directly on SimplyHired's own system.

So, if your plan is to reach out to corporate HR people, wouldn't it make sense to have a site that shows you understand them?

Then why in the world are you promoting "GET LAID, STAY PAID" on theSimply Fired blog? I just visited the site and was greeted with the following: "FIRED for eating out with the boss' daughter" and "I walked in on my boss while he was having sex with one of my co-workers. He fired me..."

This kind of stuff might entertain the job seeker, but I suspect corporate HR folks are not going to identify with this. This disconnect between business model and brand smells like trouble for SimplyHired.

As I understand it, the business model over at SimplyHired is to attract job seekers to the site (mostly by scraping jobs off the internet and surrounding them with "web 2.0" tools) and then essentially re-sell that traffic to corporate HR types. Today, most of the ads are from Google, but the long term play is to get recruiters bidding on keywords like "software engineer" directly on SimplyHired's own system.

So, if your plan is to reach out to corporate HR people, wouldn't it make sense to have a site that shows you understand them?

Then why in the world are you promoting "GET LAID, STAY PAID" on theSimply Fired blog? I just visited the site and was greeted with the following: "FIRED for eating out with the boss' daughter" and "I walked in on my boss while he was having sex with one of my co-workers. He fired me..."

This kind of stuff might entertain the job seeker, but I suspect corporate HR folks are not going to identify with this. This disconnect between business model and brand smells like trouble for SimplyHired.